I've been trying to decide which moment in Conscript I think is the scariest, and it depends essentially on your definition of fear. There's visceral fear, when something leaps out at you or it's horrifying to look at. There's also fear of the unknown, this idea that something is happening that you can't understand or control, and that it's preparing to destroy you in a way you can't defend. There are moments of Resident Evil, Amnesia, and the wonderfully postmodern Signalis in here, but if I'm trying to simplify or singularise what makes Conscript so great, it's the way it preys upon a more unusual, more intricate, and more excruciating type of fear.
Created entirely by Jordan Mochi, in Conscript, you play a young French soldier on the frontline of Verdun. Your brother has gone missing. The depleted garrison at Fort Souville is on the brink of being overwhelmed by the German Army. Absurd, manic, and indescribably bleak, there is nothing supernatural about the world of Conscript. It's a horror game of manmade proportions. Mochi's greatest achievement is how he marries the abstract mechanical traditions of games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill with a sober, historical setting and aesthetic.
At times, it becomes a little strained - when the commanding officer orders our protagonist, André, to run a message to another nearby fort, it's difficult to reconcile, narratively speaking, the amount of time I have to spend finding and collecting puzzle pieces to unlock the fort's front door. On the contrary, like Amnesia The Bunker, the tropes, characteristics, and structure of survival horror perfectly fit a game about war.
Like Elem Klimov makes Come And See look like a Hieronymus Bosch painting, or A Farewell To Arms is written in dispassionate monosyllables, if we want to get to the true nature of war, or even just impress a different aspect of war's character, we can't process it into action games and first-person shooters exclusively. The survival horror conventions of Conscript are not always a one-to-one fit with its subject matter, but by making you conscious of the comparison (it's set in World War 1; it plays like a horror game) Conscript becomes a noteworthy didactic.
Perhaps it could be purer. Perhaps it could be less familiar, less enjoyable, and less like classic Resident Evil - and if Conscript were that much more confrontational, and not so much built around traditionally engaging game mechanics, it could, maybe, become a more affecting, uncompromising work in general. But Mochi has successfully accommodated two disparate sensibilities here. Conscript is a painstaking illustration of the First World War. It's also a compelling and very playable videogame - he might have sugared the pill, but there's still a pill.
Despite the fact Mochi has made this by himself, and as such Conscript is a relatively low-budget game, it has the substance, accessibility, and entertainment value of what we might call a 'smart blockbuster,' movies like Unforgiven or Saving Private Ryan, games like Metal Gear Solid, where there's something to be said and a detectable, nourishing subjectivity, but it's still a thriller - it's still a blast. And it achieves, deftly, two things that I've always wanted war and shooting games to achieve. First, the combat in Conscript involves more and evokes more than just fun, or enjoyment.
It's tactile. It's weighty. Every time you fire a gun, it feels significant. One button aims, another fires, and a third pulls the bolt on your rifle to clear the chamber. Ammunition is scarce and every round is devastating. In short, compared to the overwhelming majority of games that have guns in them, shooting and killing in Conscript never feels idle - it's not banal, or just another input, like jumping or pressing A to open a door. Killing in Conscript takes literal effort.
Secondly and more importantly, Mochi successfully humanizes, even individualizes, Conscript's German adversaries. The people we kill in videogames are normally anonymous. They're rendered unidentifiable, or part of an amorphous mass, by the fact there are so many and that they all look the same - there are only so many character models in Call of Duty; everyone in Half-Life 2 wears a mask; and when we're invited to kill 100, 200, 300, the idea that we should notice or recognize any of these people individually is ridiculous.
But in Conscript, occasionally when you shoot an enemy soldier and search their body for health items or ammunition, you will instead find a small photograph of a wife, a son, a brother, a family. There is one moment involving a German prisoner of war that's especially affecting. It's a small conceit, a thematic sleight of hand, but it lends Conscript an empathy and humanity rarely found in war games - or games generally.
And that's what makes it frightening. Central to Conscript is the fear that what you're doing, and what's going on around you, is horrifying and devastating, but that there is no way to stop it - even worse, it's somehow normal, like the war, in all its epochal brutality, is business as usual.
You kill someone, you discover a memento of their civilian life, and you realize, reflexively, that they're a person in there. And then you kill someone else. Or they kill you. Or you watch other people kill other people. That's the fear that Conscript evokes, the one that I've not seen explored or so successfully effectuated in any other survival horror game, the fear that atrocities are a routine part of life.
You might want to try the best WW2 games, too, or maybe the best survival games on PC.